To Anti-Semitic Christians, Israel is an Usurper

The new Christian anti-Semitism is meant to strip the State of Israel of its history and roots in the land. It has happened before, but to the Jewish people as a whole.

Giulio Meotti, 05/01/15 05:50

giulio meott

צילום: עצמי

Giulio Meotti

The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books.. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary.

The Presbyterian Church USA is considering banning the word “Israel” from its prayers. That anti-Semitic resolution was meant to “distinguish between the biblical terms that refer to the ancient land of Israel and the modern political State of Israel".

It has happened.before. In his war against the Jews, Adolf Hitler instructed Christian theologians to rewrite the Bible, in a bid to remove all mention of the Jews. Their barbaric spirit is living on in the Palestinolatry of these liberal Christians.

Located in Eisenach — the city where another anti-Semite, Martin Luther, translated the Bible — the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life published treatises arguing not only that Jesus descended from non-Semitic stock, but that his mission had been directed against the Jewish people. The lead figure was Walter Grundmann (1906-76), a seminal figure in the effort to de-Judaize Christianity and marry the faith to Nazism.

These Nazified Christians vied for influence in German Protestantism with liberal figures like Martin Niemoeller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

In 1940, while Jews in Eastern Europe were already being deported to a certain death, Grundmann and his associates published their version of the Bible. Missing from it were the Old Testament and all references to the Jews.

It is not a coincidence that Grundmann rose to high positions in the East German Communist Protestant Church after the war.

The Nazi declared war on the Untermenschen Jews, the Jews without roots. Today the new Christian anti-Semitism is meant to strip the State of Israel of its history and roots in the land to better extinguish the Jews. Israel can easily become an usurper and an imposter.

From the PLO to Hamas, from Hanan Ashrawi to Sheikh Yassin, Arab rejectionists have been able to present the Palestinian Arabs as “the true descendants” of the biblical Israelites because of this Christian rewriting of history.

A few days ago, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar had an interview with NY Times kapó Roger Cohen. "Israel will be eliminated because it is a foreign body that does not belong to our area, or history or religion,” Zahar said. Referring to Israeli Jews, he continued, “Why should they come from Ethiopia, or Poland, or America?".

These are just one of the consequences of the Christian replacement theology.

In 1988 the Anglican synod of New Zealand removed the words “Zion” and “Israel” from the Psalter.In a 2013 report titled “The Inheritance of Abraham? The Promised Land,” the Church of Scotland said Israel does not belong to the Jewish people. “Promises about the land of Israel were never intended to be taken literally, or as applying to a defined geographical territory,” it said. “The ‘Promised Land’ in the Bible is not a place, so much as a metaphor of how things ought to be among the people of God. This ‘Promised Land’ can be found, or built, anywhere.” The New Testament, the report states, contains a “radical re-interpretation” of the concepts of “Israel,” “temple,” “Jerusalem,” and “land.”

The “Jewish peril” of pre- Shoah Christianity is reincarnated for post-Shoah Christianity in the State of Israel, with its corollary of the sacralization of the Arab Palestinians’ Jihad.Taken to its logical end, this Christian ideology suggests that there is only one price the Jews can pay for being accepted by the world: Israel’s elimination.

It is an anti-Semitic policy enabled by different Christian denominations, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox as well.

"Modern-day Jews are not God’s chosen people,” the head of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church, Pope Shenouda III, declared recently. For Abbé Moubarac, one of the most important representatives of the Eastern Catholicism, Israel’s liberation of Jerusalem in 1967 was a “rape” and a “ritual crime.”

L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican daily, “welcomed” the proclamation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948 with these words: “Modern Israel is not the true heir of Biblical Israel". The same was proclaimed during the Vatican's synod in 2010, when some bishops called to abolish the concept of "Promised Land" and "Chosen People".

For these Christians, the “Jewish peril” of pre- Shoah Christianity is reincarnated for post-Shoah Christianity in the State of Israel, with its corollary of the sacralization of the Arab Palestinians’ Jihad and the demonization of “the Zionists.”

In the Nazi rewriting of history and religious books, mention of Jerusalem was replaced with the words "Eternity – the Divine city of light." Now it is the turn of the Al Quds' lie instead of Yerushalaim and the the Dome of the Rock instead of the Temple Mount.

Today's most important defining question is: are the Jews the God's chosen people? I believe so. Because the entire conflict, Israel's legitimacy and Jewish sovreignty over the holy land, is all about this question.